


Regret, Breathing

by ERNest



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, F/M, Identity Issues, Presumed Dead, Regret, Season: Marielda, Season: Winter in Hieron, Social Anxiety, Wakes & Funerals, it's Hieron; death is complicated
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-19 06:27:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20652689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ERNest/pseuds/ERNest
Summary: Time works funny sometimes. The sepulcher stands, so he must have done the deed, but he hasn’t done it yet.Maelgwyn, his daddy, and deconstructing consequences.





	Regret, Breathing

The final resting place is made of marble and light, all sharp divisions of color; and nothing at all like the rugged stone of his father’s forge, or the cozy wood of his fathers’ home, or even the obsidian veins in the walls of the University his father built once with his father’s help. It is instead, Maelgwyn thinks, a parody of death made by someone who has never experienced it. But he stands in this strange angular entrance hall and shakes hands from behind his smiling mask. If it is unclear whether he is one of the bereaved or one of the guests, there is nothing for it but to shake more hands and speak more words of comfort. His fingers twitch for the blade he left on the center of his mattress because it would have been poor taste to bring it to this place.

Time works funny sometimes. The sepulcher stands, so he must have done the deed, but he hasn’t done it yet. One moment he was riding the strangely silent elevator to retrieve the mask and crown of Samot and the next he was already wearing it and walking out the door for this wake. First he will pay his respects to the one who lies sleeping in his tomb, then he will go back to put him there. He takes one immutable step and then another, and _oh_, how his body remembers this dance! He can feel how the heat curled the air in the workplace of the Artificer Divine, and he hears the shouts of those who would turn him from his task and those who would stop the first from stopping him. What he does now will determine what he did. And then –

A woman of stone enters, arm in arm with his son, and if there was ever a study in contrasts it is this pair who both lost themselves and patched their memories in such very different ways. When they met on Sundays she would order a single orange and spend their whole conversation peeling and segmenting, and he would drink wine like he _needed_ it to keep going. He watched them speak about how the city would come awake for him when his son drove his knife into… ohhh – he shudders – his _son_. The world tilts toward him, or to be more precise, he falls back to meet the ground. Because the earth demands a body, and because he has always been what was required of him, he succumbs to darkness and the whispers of movement. Maelgwyn kisses his forehead, and Castille does the same, and then only darkness.

Reality rains down on the stone box, steady and unsettled as dirt dropped from a shovel. Above, there is still time for the killing of the king-god Samothes to be rewritten, but within these eight morbid planes, there is no way to know that he is swiftly becoming part of the past – and more than that, a past that now could never have been. Sometimes even darker shapes writhe in the negative spaces left by histories reconfigured. Whichever mind is left in that divine body, it shrinks away from these things until it cannot recognize even itself. Forgetting is safety. The alternatives blaze bright around the tomb, a wall declaring _they_ will not shrink away to Nothing. Each could-have-been becomes the foundation of the next. Not everything could be saved, but enough _is_.

-/-/-

Clement Herald-News sits on the edge of his bed gripping his thighs and tells himself over and over that it’s time to go downstairs to open the inn because that’s his job now. His father is – his father was – his daddy owned the Topgallant. Elsewhere in his family history, men shared knowledge with those who needed it most, so he could have been in charge of publishing the Herald and let his employees handle talking to people; perhaps in a different lamina he did just that. Or he could have handled the day-to-day business of offering visitors to the Buoy a place to stay, and he took the option which forced him to regularly interact with strangers.

Each day he chooses again to make eye contact with another living person and give them information they wouldn’t otherwise have. Up here he knows what places and prices are important to share, and he practices his pitch until it sounds right – on good days it’s even conversational! But throw another body into the equation and all the words he planned will just fall to pieces on the floor.


End file.
